Better Learning Through Expensive Software? One Principal Thinks Not 169
theodp writes "Instead of improving the instructional practices of teachers," laments Chicago public school Principal Michael Beyer, "we are throwing vast sums of money and time at software and digital solutions that are largely untested, unproven and highly questionable." Ed-Tech vendors' so-called "weapons of mass instruction," argues Beyer, may show "gains" on the high-stakes tests because they mimic the targeted test format, but the learning gains don't necessarily transfer to the real world, or last much longer than the end of the school year. But technology in the classroom is not going away, as one commenter notes. So, what to do? Well, since U.S. CTO Megan Smith is looking for bigger technological fish to fry than weaning the White House off floppy disks, why not give her a crack at Ed-Tech, including a healthy budget and some Lab Schools where she could have educators and technologists brainstorm-and-prototype to separate the Ed-Tech wheat from the chaff without undue vendor influence and short-term test score pressure?
A Big Money Pit of Dubious Value (Score:5, Insightful)
Ed-Tech vendors' so-called "weapons of mass instruction," argues Beyer, may show "gains" on the high-stakes tests because they mimic the targeted test format, but the learning gains don't necessarily transfer to the real world, or last much longer than the end of the school year.
This has long been a problem with "standardized tests", schools teach only to the test because their jobs and budgets depend on high numbers. Thinking and teaching outside the test? Not allowed, hell, we already don't teach proper handwriting anymore.
We should absolutely be teaching technology in schools, starting with real actual math and reading comprehension, moving on to both software and hardware and other types of technology - I'm not a teacher, who knows... But like the house with an operating system, I think many of these new computer teaching tools are simply companies looking for ways to squeeze money out of people for things they don't really need, and if the government is paying for it, you know they paid a whole lot for it. Are we just fattening some venture capitalist's pocket with this stuff?
I'm on the fence about the textbooks themselves being on tablets, maybe that makes sense. But if we are going to hand off teaching to computers, why pay for anything more than a human babysitter - or is that what we are doing already?
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> hell, we already don't teach proper handwriting anymore.
What's next, not teaching to read an analog clock? Actually I suspect that has already happened. My early 20 something sisters don't know how to read an analog clock.
Personally I hate the idea of turning textbooks into tablet apps or ebooks. Think of the DRM. University and college kids might want to keep the book forever (such as a good math book or a book on timeless algorithms). How long will the textbook "app" be usable? Will it expire?
Re:A Big Money Pit of Dubious Value (Score:4, Interesting)
University and college kids might want to keep the book forever (such as a good math book or a book on timeless algorithms).
You bet I want to keep a book I pay $200 for. Many of my basic references are fro college. This is not such a big deal for grade school and high school.
And for me, I find that I can find and absorb material faster and better with printed references. Indeed, when I buy an technical ebook, I immediately print it out and put it in a ring binder (thanks, boss for the copier) ...
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I can skim through a printed book to find something faster than the related eBook will load on a modern computer (really, why are they so slow?). Forget about trying to skim on an eReader; the UIs aren't designed for it. Yes, you can run a search on an eBook, but textbooks also have an index of all the terms worth searching for.
There are studies that show you remember things better reading it from a physical book compared to reading it from an eReader. Physical books have texture and smell that get mixed
Re:A Big Money Pit of Dubious Value (Score:4, Interesting)
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My early 20 something sisters don't know how to read an analog clock.
Im not clear how exactly thats something the schools need to teach. Did they teach your siblings how to brush their teeth too?
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I remember they used to teach kinder or first grade on how to read an analog clock when I was I school, and I'm 33.
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I remember the teacher being annoyed because I already knew.
Re:A Big Money Pit of Dubious Value (Score:4, Funny)
You insensitive clod, in my time, we read sundials
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How long will the textbook "app" be usable?
Probably much longer than an actual textbook, as the "app" would get regular updates and be changed when the course or laws or whatever else making hard cover textbooks obsolete are changed.
The problem with most people in Education is that they see technology as what it is, a replacement for bad teachers, teachers whose livelihoods are being threatened. I read a quote somewhere, which said "If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, they should be".
Think about it this way, a person, who can read, can start
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Christ, if that's the pap one has to come up with these days to "win the internet", we're in a lot of trouble. So get the fuck off my Internet, I won it permanently, a long time ago. Before Chuck Norris' legion even knew what a roundhouse kick was.
Re:A Big Money Pit of Dubious Value (Score:5, Interesting)
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But if we are going to hand off teaching to computers, why pay for anything more than a human babysitter - or is that what we are doing already?
In most places that's what they are. The children are banned by law from doing anything else, and the schools are banned by law from letting (or forcing) them to do anything else.
But on the computers, the best thing about them is that they let children go much more self-paced. Except, I usually find they block the 3rd graders from doing 4th grade work, even if their ability and time allows. As someone who never fit in the school time schedule, I would have loved something that let me progress as fast or
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When a student can't figure out something, it's often because the initial instructions were wrong for the learning style of the student.
I'd suggest that the problem isn't "wrong for the learning style of the student", but rather "incomplete" or "wrong for the level of the student.
The journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest did a literature review a few years back (Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence) that identified all the methodologically sound studies into teaching to learning styles and found that they showed no evidence for anyone knowing how to teach to learning styles.
What they looked for were "crossover conditions" -
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If we are going to be reduced to resorting to "facts" and "reason", we might as well throw the entire educational research establishment away completely.
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The journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest did a literature review a few years back (Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence) that identified all the methodologically sound studies into teaching to learning styles and found that they showed no evidence for anyone knowing how to teach to learning styles.
So because nobody currently teaches to different learning styles, learning styles must not matter at all?
As a professional tutor, I have tutored people in subjects I didn't know. Seriously. Not like Cameron in "10 Things I Hate about You" where he tutored someone in French by learning the day's lesson ahead of time. I'd sit there and ask them to teach me how to do it. In explaining it to someone else, they learned more than by reading the book and copying the examples. Sure, as a good tutor, I'd ask t
Why educational technology has failed schools (Score:2)
"But on the computers, the best thing about them is that they let children go much more self-paced. Except, I usually find they block the 3rd graders from doing 4th grade work, even if their ability and time allows. As someone who never fit in the school time schedule, I would have loved something that let me progress as fast or slow as I wanted."
Decades ago, in public school, probably in third grade or so, I had a substitute teacher literally snatch a Boxcar Children series book out of my hands (which I ha
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Wow, what a schooling story. Hope you can move past the scars eventually (Kung Fu Panda II has some interesting comments at the end about scars). With "zero tolerance" policies these days, I can expect similar things happen even more often now (but with less physical stuff).
You're right about the cost of home schooling; it has been a huge opportunity cost for our family. One part of the choice is also whether our kid gets attention when young vs. a college fund etc. when older. Also, there are a lot of sing
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The Deliberate Dumbing Down of Education (Score:1)
Charlotte Iserbyt was the former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education during the Raegan years. When she took the job she read through much of the material left behind by her predecessor and discovered a deliberate plan to dumb down education. She photocopied everything and published it in a book (ISBN 0966707117). Using computers to replace teachers was something she sounded alarm bells about, saying that it is part of the plan
Re:The Deliberate Dumbing Down of Education (Score:5, Informative)
Charlotte Iserbyt is calling it a probable Soviet KGB conspiracy... which tends to damage her credibility. See http://www.newswithviews.com/i... [newswithviews.com]
Despite this, she's still accurate when saying that the education system is in decay, as it shouldn't be that expensive to teach basic reading, writing and computation.
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This may also have been a cover-story to make it harder to destroy her over her publishing it.
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Harder relative to what? Harder than if she'd claimed it was aliens pulling the strings? Or maybe unicorns?
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Charlotte Iserbyt was the former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education during the Raegan years.
And she is a certifiable loon: http://www.newswithviews.com/i... [newswithviews.com]
Did You Even Read What You Wrote? (Score:3)
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The dirty little secret is that we're wasting too much money trying to educate kids that don't give a damn about education and would rather be doing something other than learning.
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How about teaching educators how to teach. A lot of those "kids that don't give a damn about education and would rather be doing something other than learning" are that way because the adults in their lives ill-equipped to do the hard work of teaching.
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Most of the rest of Those kids that do not give a damn are boys continually alienated by a school system designed for girls and women teachers.
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And it does make results _worse_, as these kids are actively prevented by finding out what they do care for by being instead forced into something they decidedly do not. The primary and critical ingredient for all learning is that the one learning actually wants to. Coercion is not a major motivator when it comes to wanting anything.
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Q: What is fun?
A: The reaction to the experience of mental stimulation.
Most mental stimulation is linked to learning. Even when a kid goes bombing down a hill on a BMX, they're learning. They're pushing the boundaries of their balance and performance, and trying to be that little bit more efficient than the time before. Once you get over the hurdle of initial engagement, you can fascinate a child with any genuine learning.
Jerome Bruner and his colleagues once set about teaching quadratic equations to 8-yea
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You seem to have failed in your primary education, especially reading comprehension. Here it is again in simpler form: Forcing children to learn something does not result in then learning said something and hence is futile. Doing futile things is the hallmark of the stupid.
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Wrong. Forcing them to learn does sometimes work.
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What a singularly unsophisticated response. I guess these methods were used on you, to your detriment.
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If what you said was correct, nobody would have ever learned anything before "progressive" education came along. And yet clearly they did.
You fail logic and trolling.
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The dirty little secret is that we're wasting too much money trying to educate kids that don't give a damn about education and would rather be doing something other than learning.'
Yes, bring back tracking. Your parents don't care, you don't care, you want to be doing something else? Fine, you are done at Grade 6, you can come back to adult ed and the remaining 6 years of education when you want it.
It is highly controversial, but the system worked well. The concept of "no child left behind" is a monstrous lie. All children cannot attain to the same levels. It is cruel to try to force children who do not posses the correct attributes to meet a standard that is designed above their level. It is as mean as asking a 5'1" basket player to dunk against Yao Ming.
Yeah, if you actually read the law in the NCLB and whatever its successor is, you can see it's pretty much a money grab. The publishers put in this poison pill, where schools and teachers have to show AYP ("adequately yearly progress") every year, or else they're required to throw all of this money at technology programs from the publishers. If the kids going through the pipeline manage to do worse on the test two years on a row, schools are required to buy stuff, or they lose their federal funding (which
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All children can attain the same level. They all have the same mental facilities. It's a matter of interest.
I don't get why this is so hard for people to understand. Do you see that big, buff, muscly jock who can bench press 450lb? Do you know why he's big and buff? Hint: He wasn't born that way. It's a matter of training and effort. You know what makes geniuses geniuses? Training and effort. In both cases, it's technique: you'll get stronger with much less effort by using a particular training
No formal technology curriculum (Score:2)
I saw one of the ads saying that they were looking for college educated professionals who would like to transition into teaching. I was gathering information on it and found out that there was no formal technology curriculum in our local school system. I was told that I was "highly qualified" to teach math but that there was no opportunities to teach technology or computer classes.
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Wrong kind of tech.
People want digital circuitry to solve all things. Kids must be educated by computers? No, why? Because it's new, and technical, and thus better? Appeal to novelty.
There's entire schools of thought on how to educate kids. We have Waldorf education systems, which model a child's natural development and indicate that children shouldn't be given technology until age 6-7 (first grade), or even taught to read (I dissent on this), because they should be socializing; and then elementary
Trained dependency is the danger. (Score:5, Interesting)
Learning computer programs to solve math problems (for instance) can be empowering for the kids, unless they end up dependent on those proprietary programs. I think the best solution for that threat, along with some of the other issues raised in the OP is a tool set which gets kids developing software, even at really simple levels, early in their educational careers. That may sound crazy, but the world is changing, and many of the educational ideas we take for granted today sounded crazy in their times as well.
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I never understood /.'s obsession that everyone learn to program.
Schools should band together and made opensource software and textbooks and get away from the proprietary shit that so often builds in bullshit just cause it's proprietary. If every school district, of the 13,558 there are in America, would just band together and pitch in $1,000 to start it up -- the results could have been amazing.
Duolingo is a great example of what gamification can do for learning.
I think the last years was an obsession wit
Re: Trained dependency is the danger. (Score:1)
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Duolingo is a great example of what gamification can do for learning.
Yes, it's a great example of how gamification trivialises learning.
Your goal is not to learn, but to get gold in your topics (which is possible while still having "weak words" identified and to "level up". Before the last update, every question was worth the same number of "XP" -- 1, so you could "grind" on easy questions to get your score up (useless). They messed up the levels, by having an exponential-ish curve so that higher levels are harder to obtain (like in traditional RPGs) but they forgot that in
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Chicago schools (Score:5, Insightful)
After being a teacher in Joliet , Illinois system and seeing what passes for teaching and parental involvement in the Chicago land area I can quite firmly state that it isn't the money taxpayers spend, the technology that is invested in the area, nor the opportunities that students have that is the real issue.
The real issue is that there needs to be a clean out of lazy teachers and administration that refuses to interact with parents- a gallon of bleach dumped into the leach pool.
These children need people to intervene and make sure to involve the parents in all aspects of their education. Instead, we have more people involved on getting paid and protecting their pension.
It's quite sad.
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The real issue is that there needs to be a clean out of lazy teachers and administration that refuses to interact with parents
Do you have any basis for that assertion, other than your resume?
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Yes i do.
Was there a point to your post?
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Yes i do.
Then why are you keeping it a secret?
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How am I keeping it a secret?
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The Wikidrones have invaded Slashdot and demand that every post be backed by "sources" (ex. wikipedia). Of course, except for real scientific studies, no source especially on the internet is worth more than anybody's opinion. So in the end, this is done only to cast doubt on reasonable or interesting posts.
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Re:Chicago schools (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like a secret. What I've found is that 90% of parents complain that they can't get involved. Then get the notice for the PTA meeting, and refuse to come. Then show up at a school board meeting to complain about the school. The parents don't want to be involved. Every effort to involve them is a waste of time. I've seen it happen as a student and a parent. Have you actually tried engaging parents? Or just complained that the parents weren't trying to get involved, and blamed the school?
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And the last parent night at school (ask any questions you want, including having the teacher demonstrate math), less than 10% of the parents showed up.
parent's don't care because they don't speak English and work 3 jobs.
No. The PTO is a last-ditch effort to pretend that you've engaged us . . . total bullshit.
So the school should hire translators for all languages to stalk the parents for 20 minutes between shifts? How do you engage people who don't want to be engaged?
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And from my experience your experience was atypical. My mother was president of my PTA. But I think that was at least partly from lack of interest by others.
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Don't forget that the Peter Principle was discovered in education and only generalized after its validity there was firmly established.
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This, exactly this, and not just in the US, in pretty much every westernised education system.
Add to that of course addressing the HUGE gender imbalance in teaching (where is the effort to get more male teachers? yeah right,
they are being actively removed...)
Schools have become comfortable little fiefdoms with a dirty mixture of self interest, paranoia, and financial incest. The system needs to be stripped open
and scrubbed clean.
Once upon a time we had a media who would do the hard yards to achieve such thi
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Yes, they are. They are being fired, because paranoid parents assume that all male teachers are rapists, and schools are doing nothing to prevent that perception.
(and of course ignoring the amount of female teachers committing rape, both statutory and direct).
Of course that is only part of the problem, the fact is that Male and Female teachers take different approaches, which is why having both is so important.
And the 'educationalists' have a large bias to the Female approach (mostly because most of them ar
Re:Chicago schools (Score:4, Insightful)
The real issue is that there needs to be a clean out of lazy teachers and administration that refuses to interact with parents- a gallon of bleach dumped into the leach pool.
Nope, what needs to be done is to nuke the entire syllabus and system from orbit, pretty much. Even with the best will in the world, it's hard to extract anything of worth from the way most subjects are taught. You get this insane system runing round itself in circles (endless tests) to teach worthless subjects (the way e.g. maths is taught seems to be to remove any insight, ffun and worth from it and replace it with midless drudgery, and English, oh gosh whre to even begin). the result is you get both students and teachers who after a few years find it terribly hard to give a crap.
Only the teachers have to put up with it far longer than students.
With no other changes, the next lot of teachers you get to replace the current ones will soon end up apathetic and lazy because that's an almost inevitable result of the system.
Re:Chicago schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so here I am with serious mod points and should be modding but I have to take umbrage with your remarks
First of all there have to be parents that are able to interact and for that to happen you need to have at least one parent who is not exhausted after commuting, working long hours and being forced to answer e-mails from PHB's on the weekends and all other times of the day and night and having to drag work home with them to keep up with ludicrous demands.
Video games are NOT the answer, never have been never will be. We have to stop coddling children and actually educate them. My son is 13 and still I have to keep on him to get his homework done, and that is my job and I have to do it why? Because he IS 13 and just wants to play soccer and hang out with his buddies.
Yes there are some lazy teachers, but the vast majority of them really want to do good AND have parental involvement. Teachers know how to teach if you will let them and stop dumbing everything down, we have to raise our standards, not lower them.
Another thing... I don't give a FUCK what color your skin is, or whatever "troubles" you have. Take a swing at another student and that student didn't swing first, your fucking outa there! Caught with drugs or booze in school, you are fucking outa there. Take a swing at a teacher, your fucking outa there! Be a teacher and fuck a student, you go to prison, Throw a fist at a student who threw a fist and another student, or grabbed my daughters ass, you get a fucking medal!
Parents, you let your kid show up with his pants hanging below his ass? You get called, you either pick them up or the cops come pick you up, the school is NOT your fucking baby sitter!! You let your daughter go to school in Yoga pants leaving no doubt just how deep her camel toe goes or just exactly how deep her cleavage goes? You get called, you either pick them up or the cops come pick you up, the school is NOT your fucking baby sitter!!
School is a learning environment not a dating service or fight club
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You're not the only one. A lot of people have 'just a few' things they want the schools to do. In the end it becomes a hodgepodge of incoherence.
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People are asking you for your supporting evidence. (like this http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com])
You're not giving supporting evidence. In fact, you don't seem to understand what supporting evidence is. It makes me wonder what you were teaching. You're not making a convincing argument.
One thing I have learned is that when you get both sides of the story, usually turns out to be different than it looked when you only got one side.
I wonder if there's something more to this story than "lazy teachers" and lazy
Improve over time (Score:2)
Two things about software-based instruction: it can improve over time and it can be widely distributed. Human-based instruction is limited in both those areas. Someday the software-based instruction will be really good. Human teachers can get better for a while, but they eventually retire -- losing all their instructional capability.
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It can also get worse over time. Unles someone's keeping the old vesrion around, it may very well get worse.
Say, that describes something else... (Score:2)
"we are throwing vast sums of money and time at software and digital solutions that are largely untested, unproven and highly questionable"
Wait a second, you were just advocating "Improving the instructional practices of teachers" but how does the description not fit both things equally?
What instructional practices are truly "proven"? How can they be when the effectiveness varies based on students, culture and teacher (some teachers just cannot click with some stundents).
At least the unproved digital tools
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Rote learning is proven. It works quite well at instilling the basics for all but the dumbest of kids (the smart kids find it torture because they have the material down early in the process, but they do learn). Even poor teachers can use it, it's not hard or complicated.
There's been lots of effort to find something better, because few like teaching or learning that way, and it's not so good at anything beyond the basics, but the better methods often only wo
Why not give her a crack at Ed-Tech? (Score:3)
Because we already have a secretary of education and that should be HIS damned job.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: How about no (Score:2, Insightful)
You are certainly on the right track here, but the question of prestige is either chicken and egg or the tail wagging the dog depending on who you ask. My wife is often asked why she got a degree in education when she is apparently so intelligent. (Thanks!) She didn't. She got a BS in microbiology and molecular genetics before rejecting(!) grad school and med school. She then earned an MS in Biology (not Bio education or MST, etc.. A research oriented degree.) She lives in a rare state where she is paid a n
Nice try (Score:5, Interesting)
I know about education; I'm in the field too.
The real problem in modern education in the USA is that the Republicans entered into the issue. I'm not saying their ideas are all horrible; but that the political fight was so much smaller so the teachers and schools were not in the middle of a political culture war. You see, what really started the mess was that public polling showed voters ranked education higher in priority than in the past and that turned it into a two party political football. The rest is a bunch of policies and ideas which have zero basis in reality and everything to do about sounding good, getting votes, and political BRANDING. SO BOTH PARTIES WORK TO DESTROY IT like everything else they touch these days. That has harmed the system greatly which only reflects the broken political system, just another thing that precedes the collapse of a once great democracy.
Furthermore, education is not a business. You can't turn education into an easy statistic like sales and students are NOT customers!! They are not supposed to be happy customers with a "your #1" sticker handed out to everybody and every parent is immune from criticism. The culture is all fucked up; used to be the student was to blame, now the special snowflakes are perfect and the teacher is always the problem.
Yes, technology needs to be PROVEN before it's allowed to be used. SCIENCE should decide everything. That means parents (voters) will be pleased. automated tests have yet to be intelligent. I can interview a student and assess them quicker and more accurately than any static test plus they can't ever fool me. But in the land of lawsuits somebody will be upset they didn't get their "your #1" sticker... while the multiple choice exam allows many times more to sneak bye or undeservedly fail.
SCIENCE:
We can't even adjust school hours to fit best with sleeping patterns of the children when that stuff has been known forever.
Science says that middle school kids shouldn't even be educated conventionally. They need emotional development training and stuff so out of the norm many people would revolt. Most education problems are psychologically based and their parents and environment are HUGE factors. If you apply developmental psychology instead of acting like it doesn't exist, you would turn poor performing students, future criminals, and fragile suicide kids into good students and functional adults. Naturally, parents would be upset because they'd have responsibilities, something which they avoid like everything today.
Parents want free daycare. Some need it too. Snow days not only cause parents to call in irate, but it also means some children DO NOT EAT.
There is so much wrong which has so much more impact-- but we only can discuss a FEW issues and wave some shiny new toy in the public's eye... like they were children.
I suggest you look it up (Score:2)
Education was always a political issue and always will be one I did not say that it wasn't. The shift in the voting population's PRIORITIES of the issue is what caused it to be elevated to a major issue. At some point it shifted up just 1 position into the top 5 list and became a football.
Administrators are not voted in by the staff; they are hired by politicians. The public likes simple stats - which is why they'll vote for a sheriff with higher arrest numbers even though he got those by skipping real poli
Business is the customer? (Score:2)
So... Walmart needs worker drones, they are the customer and the education system manufactures worker drones to their specifications?
Cost externalization is another new MBA philosophy being pushed in all aspects possible. Even though all the great progress of the past was not done using these new techniques and new economics we will just hammer every nail with the same new MBA hammer.
Don't train employees... Don't give them any reason to stick around if you do train them. Externalize all your needs by bla
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...we can do what other successful countries have done, which is to:
d. Focus on reforming the teaching profession, from the ground up, so that teachers are the best educated, most well respected, most prominent members of the community.
Where exactly is this magical land where teachers are "the best educated, most well respected, most prominent members of the community"? I've been to a lot of countries talked with a lot of teachers & professors but none fit the glass slipper you evoke.
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NULL ABC (Score:1)
H. Beam Piper wrote about this in 1952, in his book Null ABC. The author detailed how literacy in schools continued to decline, as more and more educational gadgets became available, until society was divided between "literates" and "illiterates." The illiterates controlled the vast majority of business, but literacy was still required to practice law, and serve in the judicial branch of government.
Check out a physical version of the book here [amazon.com], an audio link here [amazon.com], a free eBook version here [gutenberg.org] and a free audio
6th grader math ciriculum (Score:1)
What nonsense to teach this to a 6th grader. First, a 6th grader has no concepts of primitive geometry, even having a difficult time understanding like dimensions and postulates.
The time wasted on this topic should have been devoted to learning fundamentals of mathematics which are the foundations for understanding geo
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I disagree, but only in part.
I don't think you need a complete understanding of axioms and postulates to get somewhere: after all those ideas contiued to develop long after the Ancient Greek civilisation collapsed.
If a 6th grader is 12, I think they'd be prefectly capable of understanding and more importantly with guidance deriving the proof which more or less involves rearranging triangles inside a square.
Of course, replacing it all with vast amounts of contextless rote memorization is awful. Frankly, it's
Slashdot needs to learn how to provide context (Score:1)
But technology in the classroom is not going away, as one commenter notes.
Yeah, well, that commenter is a VP at an edtech company, so *of course* she would promote that line.
Stop with the tabloid news, please! (Score:3)
This is just from today:
Better Learning Through Expensive Software? One Principal Thinks Not
Professor: Young People Are "Lost Generation" Who Can No Longer Fix Gadgets
Writer: How My Mom Got Hacked
US CTO Tries To Wean the White House Off Floppy Disks
Perhaps some of those are interesting topics and it's just me who is picky. But really, topics such as these are why I came to /. :
Experiments Create Particles Out of a Vacuum Using Neutrinos
The Missing Piece of the Smart Home Revolution: The Operating System
No vendor influence? (Score:2)
Teaching (Score:1)
Smart Boards WTF? (Score:2)
It all boils down to commissions (Score:4, Interesting)
Thus opensource or extremely economical systems simply can't compete. There are no scumbag salesmen using bribery and other underhanded techniques to market these solutions and as we all experienced while in schools there is no real science or evidence used when they claim to be using evidence based teaching. Any time they use studies or evidence to choose one system over another it will be evidence supplied by a large vendor.
For instance, nearly every time I hear of a new solution being implemented in my children's schools somehow one of the top decision makers has a stake in the company. Either they (or a spouse) worked for the company, work for the company, or will end up working for the company. And somehow the government "ethics" watchdogs will approve this because the person filled out the correct forms.
If I were the head person for a large school system I would immediately eliminate all contact with salespeople from all vendors. Then I would have internal committees evaluate the various offerings (including open source and low cost vendors) equally. I would also publish all the findings so that other education systems could exploit the results. But most importantly I would tell the people who were evaluating the various systems that if they have any contact with a vendor that we would immediately eliminate that vendor from consideration. And if the contact somehow were to the benefit of the examiner that their job would be in jeopardy.
Be a Good Parent (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA is a dot on the trend line of parental and educational laziness, IMHO. Parents slough off responsibility for their kids' educations to schools of questionable quality. The schools in turn palm of their work to computers. It's sad, and the only effective remedy is parental re-involvement.
I knew the schools sucked when my son was reading 3 grade levels above his peers at age 6. Now he's a sophomore in High School, and further along (knowlege-wise) toward his BSEE than most e-school juniors because I take the time to not just nurture and encourage but actually teach him at whatever level he is ready for. He's 15, and has built his own Siemens S7 PLC lab project. His science classmates won't get Ohm's Law till next year. Pity them.
We can blab all day about how to fix teh skoolz, but when it comes to your own kids, give them your best. As a parent, you owe it to them. The schools aren't going to do it for you.
I agree with you completely, but... (Score:2)
If every parent was as responsible as you are at teaching kids how to love learning, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Speaking parent-to-parent, yes, we parents need to give our kids the best. But speaking as a teacher and a tech director for a public school, parents are not giving kids their best. That's the problem.
In one classroom you can every range of student imaginable, from the one that built their own Siemens S7 PLC lab project to the one who slept in a car in freezing temperatures the night
Vital Testing (Score:3)
Computers should not be in schools (Score:1)
Computers should not be in schools outside of a computer lab.
At most, maybe a teacher could have a digital overhead projector. But these ridiculous chalk boards? iPads for every student? Come one.
The only real "tech" a school should invest in is covering the walls of each room with metal screen to turn it into a Faraday cage so the kids can't text one another.
And no, I'm not a Neo-Luddite. I just think that, in the classroom, computers do far more harm than good.
Of course not ... (Score:2)
Schools aren't funded on any of that crap.
Modern 'education' has become all about making the kids pass a standardized test and adhering to whatever crap the politicians are on about. They don't care about educating children, just
Methodology vs facts (Score:2)
But US universities have a much better reputation, in large part because the entire US educational system was originally designed to teach methodology - how to learn, rather than what to learn. The concept was basically teach a man to fish, rather than give him a fish.
This works REALLY well with highly intelligent people, as they need those tools and are usually
Sounds like public school education (Score:2)
What the principal says can translate to practically the whole public school curriculum:
"learning gains don't necessarily transfer to the real world, or last much longer than the end of the school year"
Very little in public education in the US has actually been proven, vetted, or has any evidence of efficacy. In fact, the PS system as a whole has been condemned many times for poor performance, bad practices, lack of accountability, and is essentially a money pit designed to enrich union teachers.
Kids get "e
Re: (Score:2)
Because that statement has been been proven, vetted, or has any evidence to support it.
No not all public schools perform poorly; in rich, suburban areas they do very well.
a fool and his money... (Score:2)
A trend gives rise to some new product group which drives an influx of charlatans with a marketing product and barely enough of a product to avoid fraud prosecution, along with a group of blue eyed "fresh out of college" startup types who haven't any real clue about the problem they are trying to solve, flooding an market of mostly unsophisticated buyers who need to buy but don't know what
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SRA 2.0 - boredom 'on a computer' [srareadinglabs.com].
My elementary school used the old form up through at least the late 1980s, but there was no pretense of it teaching us anything. It was blatant, boring busywork: if we finished the in-class assignment for a subject well before time was up, then we were to go do SRAs while the teacher worked with the other kids.
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In the 70's they had the SRA learning cards. Read one side. Answer the questions on the other side. Did poor? grab the extra help card. Else move to the next card.
Now it is on a computer.
The new waste of time and money.
Replace the teacher with a system. Only way to bleed the system for cash.
Apple strived to be a major part of the education system, with computer discounts or however they could.
I worked for awhile installing phone systems and installing cat5 cable. We worked at all of the local schools, It was during this time the Apple purge was going on; rooms full of Apple hardware that was on the way out, each school was the same.
While a good idea at the time, it just didn't work out.
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This is a big part of the problem here we sort of know that the system that developed over time in ancient greece along with the mideaval aprenticeship system works better then almost anything we can come up with. Theres more statistical work to be done but as social scientist hate math it's n